Category: contemporary literature

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

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Title: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
Japanese Title: 時をかける少女 (Toki o kakeru shōjo)
Author: Tsutsui Yasutaka (筒井 康隆)
Translator: David Karashima
Publication Year: 2011 (Britain); 1967 (Japan)
Publisher: Alma Books
Pages: 170

Three things are generally true of Tsutsui Yasutaka’s writing: it’s easy to read, it’s creative and fun, and it’s usually more about the concept than the characters. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is no exception. The story is short, it’s entertaining, and the idea of time travel is more fleshed out than the characters.

Junior high school student Kazuko hears a crash in her school’s science lab while helping her friends Goro and Kazuo clean up after class. When she enters the room to investigate, she smells lavender and passes out. The next morning, she and Goro are run down by a bus while rushing to school. Right before the bus strikes them, however, Kazuko opens her eyes and finds herself back in bed. She discovers that she has somehow jumped back in time to the morning of the previous day. Kazuko tells Kazuo and Goro about her strange experience, and they suggest that she talk to their science teacher, Mr. Fukushima, after school. Surprisingly enough, Mr. Fukushima listens sympathetically before explaining that Kazuko needs to jump back in time to the incident in the science lab in order to figure out what happened. She does so and meets Kazuo, who explains everything to her before erasing her memory and returning to where he originally came from.

And that is the story. Nothing else really happens. Kazuo’s debriefing is interesting, but there is no on-screen adventuring or experimentation on the part of Kazuko. There is no narrative tension, just a bit of simple mystery solving. None of the characters really stand out. Kazuko is frightened and dependent on the help of others, Goro is childish and petty, and Kazuo drifts along without contributing anything until the last three or four chapters. The two other named characters, Mr. Fukushima and Kazuko’s friend Mariko, barely have any lines at all. Director Hosoda Mamoru’s 2006 animated adaptation is much richer in terms of storytelling and character development. Still, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is a quick and easy read that should appeal to a younger audience.

A bit more interesting than the main novella is the shorter work “The Stuff Nightmares Are Made Of,” which is also included in the book. In this story, junior high school student Masako tries to get to the bottom of her fear of heights, which is somehow connected to the discomfort she feels around Prajna masks. Masako’s close friend Bunichi passes along what his therapist uncle tells him about the psychology of fear, and Masako uses this information to help not only herself but also her five-year-old brother Yoshio, who suffers from night terrors. The relationship between Masako and Yoshio is charming and sweet, as is the budding romance between Masako and Bunichi.

If I had to guess, I would say that the two stories in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time are meant for kids who are a bit younger than their protagonists, despite the adult woman adorning the book’s cover. They’re both entertaining, simple stories for the age seven to twelve crowd. If you’re an adult reader in North America who can’t seem to find a copy of this British publication, though, you’re not missing much. The movie is definitely better.

The Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories

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Title: The Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories
Editors: John L. Apostolou and Martin H. Greenburg
Publication Year: 1997
Publisher: Barricade Books
Pages: 176

In the introduction of The Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories, editor John Apostolou informs the reader that, prior to the publication of this collection, it was very difficult to find Japanese science fiction in English translation. Translations of a few Abe Kōbō novels (such as The Ark Sakura and Inter Ice Age 4) had been published by Knopf, but the majority of translations of science fiction stories (such Arai Motoko’s A Ship to the Stars and Takachiho Haruka’s The Adventures of Dirty Pair) were only available from the Kodansha English Library, which was (and still is) virtually impossible to find outside of Japan. The purpose of The Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories, then, was to collect translations of short stories by major Japanese sci-fi authors such as Hoshi Shinichi, Hanmura Ryō, and Komatsu Sakyō.

Most of the thirteen stories in this collection are less than ten pages long. Some (like Abe Kōbō’s “The Flood” and Komatsu Sakyō’s “The Savage Mouth”) read like modern parables of the nastier aspects of human nature, while some (like Hanmura Ryō’s “Tansu” and Kōno Tensei’s “Triceratops”) are more dark fantasy than science fiction. Others, however, are examples of speculative fiction at its best. One of my favorite stories in the collection is Tsutsui Yasutaka’s “Standing Woman,” which is a window into a dystopian future in which anyone caught grumbling about the wrong thing – whether it’s high prices at the supermarket or too much overtime at work – is punished by being “vegetized” and planted next to a sidewalk or park bench. The story that closes the collection, Yano Tetsu’s “The Legend of the Paper Spaceship,” comes as close as a twenty-page short story can get to being a masterpiece of science fiction. It features a mysterious woman, a psychic son, an isolated village in the country, and strange legends that all come together to suggest secrets and cosmic mythologies that are illuminated just enough to capture the reader’s imagination.

Although the translation is a bit wonky in places (particularly in Kita Morio’s “The Empty Field”), I really enjoyed reading all of the stories in The Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories, and the foreword and introduction provided interesting glimpses into the process of how these stories were translated. If I am allowed one complaint, however, it would be that there are no female writers represented by this collection. I would recommend that anyone looking for an overview of the many female sci-fi writers in Japan should check out Kotani Mari’s essay “Alien Spaces and Alien Bodies in Japanese Women’s Science Fiction” in the essay collection Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams. (If you can read Japanese, Kotani’s monograph Technogynesis is also fun and informative.) In any case, The Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories served its purpose by making me want to read more Japanese science fiction short stories, and from here I’m planning on moving on to Speculative Japan and Speculative Japan 2.

The Bamboo Sword

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Title: The Bamboo Sword and Other Samurai Tales
Japanese Title: 藤沢周平短編集 (Fujisawa Shūhei tampenshū)
Author: Fujisawa Shūhei (藤沢 周平)
Translator: Gavin Frew
Publication Year: 2005 (America); 1976-1988 (Japan)
Publisher: Kodansha International
Pages: 253

The single sentence of text on the back side of this book’s dust jacket reads: “Evocative, exciting, and tender, these charming tales open a window onto life in Japan as it was four hundred years ago.” Although I am generally wary of the unironic use of the word “charming,” I have to agree that it’s the word that best describes The Bamboo Sword. These stories are charming. They’re light-hearted and don’t take themselves too seriously. Men are masculine, women are feminine, ideals like honor and virtue hold true, and the good guys always win in the end.

If I had to guess, I might say that the target audience for these stories are oyaji, older middle-aged men who are generally considered to just about the least cool people in Japan (unless they happen to be Kitano Takeshi). Oyaji are the workhorses of the Japanese economy but never get enough respect. They enjoy the simple pleasures of life, such as drinking and enka, and all they need is a little love to help them maintain their daily struggles for the sake of their families and their country. They can come off as grumpy sons of bitches, but really they’re all good people deep inside. I say that oyaji are the target audience for The Bamboo Sword because the protagonist of each of the book’s eight stories is an Edo-period oyaji. These (mostly) samurai protagonists are down on their luck, especially since there’s not much fighting to be done in the Edo period, but they shine when given a chance to prove themselves.

The stories in The Bamboo Sword tend to alternate between domestic pieces and action pieces. A good example of one of the domestic stories is “Out of Luck,” in which an out-of-work rake named Sanjiro seduces a girl and then dumps her. The girl’s dad tracks down Sanjiro, hauls him out of the bar he frequents with his friends, and forces him to come home and marry his daughter. The father is a rice merchant, and employs Sanjiro as his apprentice. Sanjiro hates the strict training, but his new father-in-law cheerfully chases him down every time he tries to escape. In the end, Sanjiro falls in love with his wife, takes over the family business, and wonders how he could have ever enjoyed the pathetic lifestyle he used to live before his father-in-law beat some sense into him.

My favorite action story is called “The Runaway Stallion,” which is about a samurai named Tsubuki Jubei who inadvertently becomes involved in a political plot. Jubei’s old rival, who has since become a Vice Councilor, volunteers Jubei as a bodyguard for a courier delivering extremely sensitive information. Jubei and the courier are ambushed, and Jubei, who had become more interested in drinking and grumping around than training as he got older, is almost killed. Jubei realizes that he really needs to get his act together and goes back to his old fencing teacher, begging him to whip him into shape. Thus begins a training montage, over the course of which Jubei stops a runaway horse with his bare hands and learns more about the political plot that almost got him killed. It turns out that the Vice Councilor is not such a good person and wants Jubei dead for his own petty reasons. By the end of the story, though, Jubei defeats his enemy and proves himself to be a badass. The woman who is living with him as a maid singlehandedly stops an assassin and is also a badass. If there were a dog in the story, you can bet that the dog would secretly be a badass too. It’s just that kind of story.

The Bamboo Sword is very light reading. Its stories are indeed “charming.” There is some tension between classes, some tension between political ideologies and social realities, and some classic samurai-style tension between giri and ninjō, but the main conflict in the book is between the protagonists’ alcoholic tendencies and their desire to be awesome. It’s not difficult to read these characters as the fictional embodiments of wish-fulfilling fantasies on the part of an older generation of salaryman corporate warriors. In short, The Bamboo Sword is like chick lit for old dudes. Even if its system of values is a bit stodgy, it’s still a lot of fun.

Hear the Wind Sing

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Title: Hear the Wind Sing
Japanese Title: 風の歌を聴け (Kaze no uta o kike)
Author: Murakami Haruki (村上 春樹)
Translator: Alfred Birnbaum
Publication Year: 1979 (in Japanese); 1987 (in translation)
Publisher: Kodansha English Library (講談社英語文庫)
Pages: 130 (plus 15 pages of translation notes)

I love A Wild Sheep Chase. The narrator’s daily life in Tokyo, the narrator’s sojourn in Hokkaido, the mystery of the sheep, and the philosophical musings on genius and individuality all come together into an interesting and compelling story. There’s this one weird bit, though, after the narrator leaves Tokyo but before he reaches Sapporo. This is the chapter describing the narrator’s visit to a place called J’s Bar. He doesn’t visit J’s Bar in real time; rather, he remembers having visited it in the past. J’s Bar, we learn, is where he and a character called “the Rat” used to drink when they were younger. I always felt that there was something about the narrator’s relationship to the Rat and J’s Bar that Murakami wasn’t telling us. As a result, this short, atemporal section connecting Tokyo and Hokkaido felt disjointed and out of place. Perhaps the reason it felt this way to me is because I had never read Murakami’s earlier novels, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973. A Wild Sheep Chase is part of a tetralogy (which is concluded by Dance Dance Dance), so it only makes sense that I would be missing something by having started in the middle.

Hear the Wind Sing is a short I-novel in the style of Shiga Naoya, by which I mean that it involves a young man who wanders around aimlessly while thinking about how pointless his life is. I don’t mean to imply that the novel isn’t worth reading, because it certainly is. There just isn’t much of a plot. The narrator, who is a college student majoring in biology, has returned from Tokyo to his hometown by the sea for the summer. He spends his days chilling out and his nights drinking in a small, run-down pub called J’s Bar. J is a middle-aged Chinese man who has befriended the narrator and his drinking buddy, a young college dropout nicknamed the Rat (“Nezumi”). One night, the narrator goes to the bathroom in J’s Bar and finds a young woman passed out on the floor. He gets her address from her purse, takes her home, puts her to bed, and then falls asleep in her apartment. The novel meanders between the sporadic interactions between the narrator and this woman, about whom neither the narrator nor the reader ever learns much before she disappears forever. Between these interactions, the narrator briefly reflects on his past romantic relationships and thinks about writing and literature, which he discusses with the Rat. The story is bookended at its beginning and end by sustained discussions of Derek Heartfield, a (fictitious) early twentieth-century writer of speculative fiction whose life and work, the narrator concludes, showed promise but ultimately went nowhere.

Hear the Wind Sing is a short novel, and it feels even shorter because of its frequent chapter breaks (about once every four or five pages) and frequent page breaks within chapters. There’s no real pattern to the narration, which includes conversations, reminiscences, literary speculation, song lyrics, and a bit of linear storytelling. Despite this lack of cohesion, everything flows together nicely, and the way that the main themes of the novel (such as the inability of any one person to really know any other person) are elliptically approached is fairly effective. The narrative voice contains far more humor than self-pity and keeps the reader moving easily through the novel. This narrative voice is broken a few times by the insertion of the voice of a radio rock station DJ, who has some of the best passages in the whole book. Such a fragmented narrative style effectively captures the experience of being a college student at home for the summer, moving through the days without a clear sense of purpose and half-heartedly wondering what the future will bring. There’s no grand mystery of the sort that forms the core of A Wild Sheep Chase, but the narrator is same amiable personality who sees the world through a perceptive yet detached perspective. If you can get your hands on this book (which is fairly easy to do at major Japanese bookstores or through Amazon.co.jp), it’s a quick and enjoyable read, especially for fans of Murakami’s writing style. Birnbaum’s translation notes at the end of the book are also a nice treat for people who are interested in that sort of thing.

Nemuri

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Title: ねむり (Nemuri)
Author: Murakami Haruki (村上 春樹)
Illustrations: Kat Menschik
Publication Year: 2010
Publisher: Shinchōsha
Pages: 95

Every once in awhile, someone will ask me for advice on how to start reading literature in Japanese.

…Okay, I’m just kidding. No one has ever asked me that.

But I wish someone would, because then I could tell them about how Murakami Haruki is one of the easiest Japanese writers to read in the original Japanese language. His critics have said of him that reading his writing is like reading American English translated into Japanese. I think that’s supposed to be a bad thing; but, if you’re a reader of American English without a lot of experience reading Japanese, that sort of “translated” style is a godsend. Murakami’s sentences are relatively short and don’t have an unmanageable number of clauses, his paragraphs begin and end in reasonable places, the reader can easily differentiate between subject and object, his usage of idiom is generally familiar to someone who speaks English, and – best of all – he doesn’t use all sorts of crazy, high-level kanji.

This is not to say that Murakami’s style or stories are childish and simplistic. Rather, Murakami has a unique style, and that style is very accessible to people used to reading American English. Murakami’s system of allusive references should also be familiar to anyone who has grown up outside of Japan and has a passing familiarity with cultural figures from John Lennon to John Irving. I don’t mean to suggest that Murakami’s writing is some sort of hodgepodge amalgamation of Western culture, though, as his imagery and analogies and narrative structures are definitely his own.

Another nice thing about Murakami Haruki is that he has written a ton of short stories. These short stories have been collected into small, inexpensive books like Barn Burning and The Second Bakery Attack, but single stories are occasionally published individually in larger hardcover editions. “Nemuri” (translated as “Sleep” in The Elephant Vanishes) is one of those stories. It was originally published in 1989 in the collection TV People; but, when the German publisher DuMont issued an edition of the story with illustrations by Kat Menschik, Murakami edited and updated the story so that a similar art book quality edition could be published in Japan. Such an edition was published, obviously, and it’s gorgeous.

The story itself is interesting as well. The female first-person narrator once experienced a bout of insomnia in college, but she got over it and went on to marry a dentist and become a housewife. After having a kid and living with her family for several years, the protagonist’s life has fallen into a pattern of comfortable routine. One night, however, she experiences a terrifying case of sleep paralysis and wakes up to find that she is no longer has any physical urge to sleep. She tries to go back to bed, but she is simply not tired. She therefore pours herself a glass of brandy and begins reading Anna Karenina. The next night, she’s still not tired, so she continues not to sleep while staying up all night reading. Two nights turn into two weeks, and the narrator’s thoughts range from her daily life to the value of literature to how sleep works to the nature of life itself. Eventually, her musings on life turn into musings on death, and the narrative tension mounts until the story reaches and strange and disturbing conclusion.

Despite its unaffected language and seemingly flat surface, Nemuri possesses a very literary flavor and rewards slow and careful reading. Kat Menschik’s surreal and striking illustrations, which are loosely based on the text, offer another layer of possible meaning and interpretation. If you’re looking for a good place to start reading Japanese literature, then, I would venture that Nemuri is as good of a place to start as any. The Japanese characters are clear and sharp and large enough to read easily, the textual layout isn’t too dense on the page, and there are enough chapter breaks and illustrations so that even the slowest reader will feel as if she is making good progress through the book. The meta-textual elements implicit in the discussions of Anna Karenina are oddly motivating for the reader as a reader, and the story itself is fantastic and compelling. The whole package is just about perfect. Even if you’ve already read the story in TV People, it’s still worth picking up a copy of Nemuri if you see it on your next trip to a Japanese bookstore.

Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs

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Title: Digitial Geishas and Talking Frogs:
The Best 21st Century Short Stories from Japan
Editor: Helen Mitsios
Publication Year: 2011
Publisher: Cheng & Tsui
Pages: 240

Digitial Geishas starts off slow. Pico Iyer’s introduction to the collection is breezy (“When guidance comes in this anthology, it comes only from a six-foot tall frog; many characters in these tales are weirdly passive, just killing time until a tsunami, a pregnancy or two dangerously seductive girls appear on the horizon to shake them out of their stupor”) and even more disconnected and fragmented than the travel writer’s usual style. The opening piece, “The Floating Forest,” is boring, even though it’s written by Kirino Natsuo, a writer of psychological thrillers whose work is usually anything but boring. I suppose Kirino’s story about a daughter of a famous writer is meant to establish a theme of breaking away from the past and emerging into a new century, but it’s still rambling and tedious. The next story, Toshiyuki Horie’s “The Bonfire,” is like one last look back over our shoulders at “old Japan” and the remnants of its traditions of “pure” literature.

And then things start to get interesting.

“Ikebukuro West Gate Park” is a selection from Ishida Ira’s series of novels by the same name (which have been translated into French), and it’s awesome. The story is reminiscent of the anime series Durarara!! in its colorful urban setting, its cast of interesting and multifaceted characters, and its use of social networking and bizarre crime as plot devices. This story has everything – youth culture, counter-culture, underground culture, and literary culture – and its English translation is worth the price of the entire book just by itself.

The stories that follow it are equally fascinating. Murakami Haruki’s “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo” is a perfect example of the author’s trademark magical realism, Shimada Masahiko’s “The Diary of a Mummy” chronicles suicide through starvation from a first-person perspective, Ogawa Yōko’s “The Sea” is all sorts of strange and creepy and touching and brilliant, and Tsujihara Noboru’s “My Slightly Crooked Brooch,” in which a woman consents to her husband’s affair, is a lovely tale of obsession with the perfect twist ending.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading the stories in Digital Geishas, which showcases a fairly wide range of authors, who are all (with the possible exception of Kirino) flattered by the editor’s choice of their work. Although the subject matter of the stories contained within this volume is broad, the general tone of the anthology is far more literary than its title suggests. Finally, Helen Mitsios has done an excellent job not only with the selection of stories but also with the way they flow from one to another, and the individual translations have been edited to maintain a cohesive yet unobtrusive “house style” that still manages to show off the individual writing style of each author. In short, Digital Geishas contains a good batch of stories that have benefited from solid editing. This book is a wonderful follow-up to Mitsio’s earlier compilation, New Japanese Voices.

Review copy provided by Cheng & Tsui.

The Lake

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Title: The Lake
Japanese Title: みずうみ (Mizuumi)
Author: Banana Yoshimoto (吉本 ばなな)
Translator: Michael Emmerich
Publication Year: 2011 (America); 2005 (Japan)
Publisher: Melville House
Pages:188

I have been waiting for this book to come out for months. When it finally did, I read it in one sitting. As with many of Yoshimoto’s novels, it was occasionally frustrating, but I liked it. I guess one could say that The Lake is typical Yoshimoto. Allow me to explain.

The novel’s protagonist and first-person narrator, Chihiro, comes from a non-traditional family, works in a non-traditional profession, never worries about material things like money or the future even though she’s almost thirty, and seems to float through life, although she has hidden depths:

It’s like when you decide to build a house: some people want to go and find the land first, then hire an architect to help them draw up plans, and then choose the materials for the walls and everything on their own. I’m not like that. I prefer to wander around until I stumble across something, then I do the best I can with it, scrutinizing this thing I’ve discovered, getting to know it for what it is.

The heroine meets her love interest in an offbeat and untraditional way – in this case, he lives across the street from her, and they wave to each other from their respective windows until he talks to her on the street and casually starts showing up in her apartment. This love interest, Nakajima, is a grad student (first warning sign) and a stereotypical herbivore male:

I got the sense that he wasn’t really into sex, and he was shockingly thin, and although there were days when he would consume an astonishing amount, ordinarily he ate almost nothing, so overall he didn’t seem very energetic.

Nakajima is a little weird. Besides not having any friends and never wanting to sleep with our protagonist, he also exhibits behavioral quirks, such as his insistence on keeping detailed tallies of the money he owes Chihiro for using water and electricity when he stays over at her place. But Chihiro is still in love with him:

Whenever Nakajima said my name, every single time, it sparkled like a treasure. I had no idea why. Wow – did you see how that flashed? Say it again for me, please!

Chihiro gradually comes to realize that there is something seriously wrong with Nakajima; but, since she’s become attached to him, she decides to take it slow. As she ever so articulately explains to a friend:

“Anyway, he’s not like other people at all, it’s like, I don’t know how to describe it, like he’s living in the clouds, maybe. Like when people talk about someone having transcended it all – he’s like that, I guess. So part of me thinks it’s just in his makeup, and he would have been this way even if nothing had happened. For the time being I’ll just keep watching, I won’t rush it.”

Finally, Nakajima asks Chihiro to go with him to visit two old acquaintances who live in a cottage by a lake. Chihiro has been worried that Nakajima will leave her, either physically (by suddenly disappearing from her apartment) or psychically (by entering a long-term catatonic trance). She’s also bothered by his plans to leave Japan and study in Paris, which don’t seem to include her at all. She thinks about her anxieties as she walks around the lake with a trembling and profusely sweating Nakajima, but she still supports him, because:

He was an adult, perhaps thirty-five or so, and yet he was extremely small, like a child. His face seemed kind of shrunken, giving him the look of a bulldog. His eyes were sparkling, though, and there was something noble in the way he carried himself.

Do you feel like you’re reading a shōjo manga yet?

The narrative is driven forward by a twinned pair of mysteries: who are the people who live on the lake, and what is Nakajima’s damage? Both mysteries are solved when Chihiro returns to the lake on her own around thirty pages before the book ends; and, to give the author credit, they are resolved quite nicely and sufficiently satisfied my morbid, look-at-the-car-wreck curiosity. Still, I wasn’t too terribly invested in figuring out what was going on (the blurb on the book jacket sort of spoils it with its overt mention of religious cults), and I didn’t really care about the relationship between Chihiro and Nakajima, which was more hurt/comfort than actual romance.

What was interesting to me were the descriptions of small-town politics. The majority of the story is set in Tokyo, but Chihiro comes from a small town where her father wasn’t allowed to marry her mother, who worked as the mama-san of a small bar. Chihiro’s assessment of her father’s family, the patrons of her mother’s bar, and the atmosphere of the town in general are acerbic and insightful. Also, Chihiro works as a muralist, and one of her friends commissions her to create a mural on one of the walls of a run-down community center in a small neighborhood in Tokyo in an effort to save the structure from being demolished. The interplay between Chihiro, the community center, the local government, and a potential sponsor of the project is dramatic in a quiet sort of way, and Chihiro’s explanations of her creative process as she interacts with the people who watch her work are also interesting.

If you like Banana Yoshimoto for her quirky characters, fragmented yet loving families, and universes almost like our own but one step closer to the supernatural, then you’ll like The Lake. If you dislike Banana Yoshimoto for the lack of adult judgment in her characters and her rambling, juvenile prose (which is tight like a handful of squirming hamsters), then you probably won’t like The Lake. For the record, I like the book, and I also think Michael Emmerich did an excellent job of translating it.

Gold Rush

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Title: Gold Rush
Japanese Title: ゴールドラッシュ (Gōrudo Rasshu)
Author: Yū Miri (柳 美里)
Translator: Stephen Snyder
Publication Year: 2002 (America); 1998 (Japan)
Publisher: Welcome Rain Publishers
Pages: 286

I recently stumbled across an article titled Reading List: Books to Help You Understand Japan, which is a transcript of a conversation between NPR’s Neal Conan, the Brooklyn-based poet Kimiko Hahn, and Donald Keene, who recently retired from Columbia University in order to live in Japan. When Hahn and Keene were asked to list their top five works for understanding Japan in the wake of the recent disasters that have beset the country, they fired off titles like The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon and Essays in Idleness. This bothers me for three reasons.

The first reason is the blatant cultural essentialism, or the idea that one can understand everything about contemporary Japan by reading texts written in the Heian period, as if nothing has changed in the past thousand years. It’s like saying that one can understand everything about contemporary America by reading Jonathan Edwards’s 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The Japanese people live (and have always lived) in harmony with nature and posses (and have always possessed) an innate understanding of the beauty of impermanence – and Americans are all God-fearing Puritans who stifle their artistic creativity and capitalistic interests in order to serve their small agricultural communities.

The second reason is the academic elitism. The Tale of Genji is indeed a great monument of Japanese literature. It is also more than a thousand pages long, written in a style that is frustratingly elliptical, and set in a time period and society that are fairly alien to anything a contemporary American (or Japanese) reader would be familiar with. Reading The Tale of Genji is hard, and reading it without guidance is even harder. To assume that even a highly educated and intelligent reader could just pick it up and understand the unadulterated beauty of every word is somewhat presumptuous. Hahn’s recommendation of two literary anthologies is even more baffling. It’s like saying, hey, if you can’t crack open a 421-page anthology of medieval literature and read it in one sitting, there must be something wrong with you.

The final reason is the utterly bizarre assumption that, in order to understand the contemporary Japanese imagination of disaster, one need not read anything either written or set later than 1945. This is doubly strange to me, as Donald Keene recently published an excellent translation of Oda Makoto’s 1998 novel The Breaking Jewel (Gyokusai), which depicts a Japanese soldier’s harrowing experiences during the last few weeks of the Pacific War. Moreover, even if tales of firebombings and severe food shortages and suicide attacks and two atomic bombs and total defeat and occupation by a foreign power wouldn’t give us any insight into postwar and post-earthquake Japanese society, perhaps something like Murakami Haruki’s After the Quake, written in the wake of the devastating Kobe earthquake of 1995, presumably would. To suggest that we can best understand Japanese anxieties regarding nuclear power by reading the poetic travel diaries of Bashō is, quite frankly, ridiculous.

I think Yū Miri’s novel Gold Rush is a perfect antidote to the sort of essentialist thinking demonstrated in the conversation on NPR. Gold Rush is set in Yokohama’s Kogane-chō neighborhood, a wrong-side-of-the-tracks sort of neighborhood filled with small bars, cheap restaurants, pachinko parlors, and love hotels. When most people think of Yokohama, they probably picture the swanky and high-tech Minato Mirai waterfront area or the upscale Motomachi shopping and residential district that serves as the setting of several Tanizaki and Mishima novels. Kogane-chō, however, is a grungy, run-down pleasure quarter that has seen better days, as is the neighboring Isezaki-chō. The streets are dirty, the Ōoka River is dirty, the karaoke bars are dirty, the train station is dirty, the cheap hotels under the railway bridge are dirty, and I imagine that even the many soaplands that dot the area are dirty. Gold Rush begins when four middle school boys pick up a high school girl in this neighborhood. They get her drunk, have her come with them to one of their houses, and then rape her. To be more precise, three of them rape her, and one of them watches.

The one who watches is the book’s fourteen-year-old protagonist, Kazuki, and abetting a rape is just the beginning for him. If trigger warnings were applied to mainstream fiction, Gold Rush would be slapped with all of the big ones. Rape, violence, child abuse, murder, more rape, more child abuse, substance abuse, abandonment, sexism, self-harming behavior, eating disorders, more child abuse, and then more rape. There is also a particularly nasty scene in which Kazuki kills a dog with a golf club. One might question the existence of a plot buried under all of these triggers, but the plot isn’t really the point of the novel. The reader is instead engrossed in following Kazuki’s slow psychological deterioration from the perspective of an omniscient third-person narrator. Kazuki is like Holden Caulfield on crack, and the reader can’t help but identify with his adolescent frustration at the realization that his life and his destiny are not entirely his own, even if he continually takes his rage one step too far. The people who surround Kazuki aren’t much better than he is in terms of acting like decent human beings, and the world they all live in is a bitter, nasty place. In a way, though, Gold Rush is also a twisted sort of love letter to Kogane-chō and the low city charm that permeates it.

Reading Gold Rush is like reading a full-length Ionesco play like Rhinocéros (or a Bret Easton Ellis novel like American Psycho) in that it’s trenchant and biting and brilliantly absurd, but difficult to actually read for the very same reasons. It doesn’t help that Gold Rush is two hundred and fifty pages of ultraviolence unmitigated by chapter breaks. If there’s a reason the novel won the Akutagawa Prize, however, it’s because the writing is excellent. Perhaps it’s also because the physical and psychological spaces written by Yū Miri are more than a little familiar to Japanese readers. So yes, classics like The Tale of Genji are very Japanese, but so is Gold Rush, which is written by a zainichi Korean telling a story about juvenile delinquency in a decaying neighborhood of a seedy commuter city. Yū is a good writer, she tells a good story, and Gold Rush is good Japanese literature. It might even give the reader some small insight into contemporary Japan as well.

Translucent Tree

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Title: Translucent Tree
Japanese Title: 投光の樹 (Tōkō no ki)
Author: Takagi Nobuko (高樹 のぶ子)
Translator: Deborah Iwabuchi
Publication Year: 2008 (America); 1999 (Japan)
Publisher: Vertical
Pages: 188

My past experiences with romance novels have been few and far between. My grandmother used to keep a few around her house back in the early nineties, and they were mostly period pieces with titles like “Master and Maid” and “Forbidden Tryst” (my favorite was “The Pirate Slave;” the cover art was epic). I’ve never actually read a romance novel all the way through, but I’ve always been curious about them (especially after finishing Loving with a Vengeance a few days ago). I’ve heard that Takagi Nobuko is a famous and prolific romance novelist in Japan, so I figured that a translation of her award-winning novel Translucent Tree would be as good of a place as any to begin a foray into the magical world of bodice rippers. If nothing else, I was drawn by the cover, which displays a super-phallic pinecone superimposed over a triangular spray of pine needles, which are suggestively cleft down the middle under the dust jacket. Classy, right?

Translucent Tree is a story of star-crossed lovers. Following the conventions of a tale as old as time (or at least as old as 1949, when Harlequin established its basic formula for romance), the man is wealthy and a bit of a jerk, and the woman is struggling financially and a bit immature. The man, Go, lives in Tokyo, and the woman, Chigiri, lives in a town close to the Japan Sea called Tsurugi (which actually exists). Go, who makes his living as a documentary filmmaker, had once worked on a piece featuring Chigiri’s father, a metalworker knowledgeable about traditional sword-smithing techniques. During the filming, Go met Chigiri. Chigiri was a child at the time, but the two left strong impressions on each other.

Years later, Chigiri has divorced her husband and moved back to Tsurugi with her daughter to take care of her bedridden father. Go returns to Tsurugi on a whim in order to revisit a famous cedar tree and ends up running into Chigiri. The sparks fly, and the two enter into a strained long-distance relationship in which neither can be completely honest with the other. Go offers money to Chigiri in an attempt to help her father, to whom he still feels a debt of gratitude, and Chigiri tries to compensate Go by sleeping with him. Since they love each other but can’t bring themselves to admit it, their brief encounters are fraught with sexual and emotional tension.

Takagi’s portrayal of Go and Chigiri’s relationship is heartbreakingly honest at times. Their inane phone conversations are painfully awkward, and their inability to communicate is endearing, as is the emotional blackmail to which they subject themselves. Neither Go nor Chigiri is portrayed as being particularly attractive, and both of them have legitimate personality flaws. Go can be an asshole, and Chigiri can be annoyingly dense. Despite this, they’re attracted to each other in what strikes me as a very human and realistic way.

What I didn’t appreciate, however, were Takagi’s attempts to add an element of timelessness to the narrative by characterizing Go as some sort of Eternal Man and Chigiri as an Eternal Woman. Translucent Tree is filled with overgeneralizing sexist statements, like:

What she hadn’t counted on was the inability of men to understand the depth of a woman’s resolution. Women are determined and tenacious when men are of precious little use merely because women lack adaptability; it’s impossible for them to take a step or speak a work unless they have thought things over thoroughly and adopted a plan of action.

Really? No one taught me that when I was going to woman school. I had no idea I was supposed to lack adaptability. There are similar statements on subjects such as how men and women lie differently (apparently, women reveal information selectively while men just make things up) and why men travel but women don’t (women are roots and men are branches, you see). The utterly non-ironic way in which these pronouncements are made grated on my nerves every time I encountered one.

Another aspect of Takagi’s writing that hit slightly off the mark was her pillow talk. Being a romance novel, Translucent Tree has its fair share of eight-page sex scenes. Fun sexytimes are always a welcome addition to any narrative; but, unfortunately, each of Translucent Tree’s bedroom shots is more awkward and stilted than the last. It’s possible that this awkwardness is largely the fault of the translator, who apparently never got the memo on how not to write sex, but I am still going to have to point my finger at Takagi herself for her descriptions that read like something out of bad fanfiction:

They were both thinking about the same thing, but from different positions. Chigiri was at the top of the mountain peering down at the deep valley between her legs and, beyond that, at her slippered feet, which felt oddly detached from the rest of her body. Go was standing at the foot of the mountain gazing deep inside the valley, waiting for the right moment to start the trek in.

I use this particular passage as an example because it’s a paragraph of self-contained awkwardness instead of two pages of gradually building awkwardness, but I think it’s also useful to illustrate not only what is merely amusing about Translucent Tree but also what is genuinely interesting. The numerous nature and geography metaphors throughout the text posit Go and Chigiri not just as the Eternal Man and the Eternal Woman but also as New Japan and Old Japan. Romantic conceits relating to nostalgia for an imagined Japanese tradition have been embodied in female characters before, but I think Takagi handles this device remarkably well. Chigiri’s hometown of Tsurugi is an appealing mix of old-style sushi shops and historic trees in the middle of rice fields. Chigiri herself is less of an idealization of well-bred Japanese femininity and more of a portrait of an earthier type of woman who has weathered the blows of misfortune yet still maintains the passionate core of her being. Go’s Tokyo is not a steampunk wonderland of trains and tall buildings but rather a shabby place where the human relationships are shallow, the food is all takeout, and the old pinup calendar on the wall is slowly turning yellow.

Go’s attempts to capture and preserve Old Japan through the lens of a camera are ultimately meaningless, while Chigiri’s charm is wasted as she slowly goes to seed out in the boondocks. It’s only through their relationship with each other that the two really come alive, and their first tryst is perhaps the most memorable scene in the book, if only because of its setting in a beautiful, “traditionally” Japanese estate in the countryside. In this scene, cultural imagery and sexual imagery are reflected back on one another repeatedly. Through its interaction with New Japan, then, Old Japan is both refreshed and refreshing. In the impact of its use of geography as metaphor, Translucent Tree is just as brilliant as As I Lay Dying or Deliverance. I can see why the book has won awards, even though the “romance” aspects of the novel are somewhat lacking. Although its gender politics tended to rub me the wrong way, I enjoyed Translucent Tree, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys Japan fantasies of the sort written by Kawabata Yasunari or Muriel Barbery.

Speaking of geography, I’m sure that by now everyone has heard about how Japan survived its most recent encounter with subterranean catfish tremors and walls of liquid death marching toward the coast. Not to lessen or belittle the tragedy, but I think the country handled the situation remarkably well, and I hope that the governments of other countries (*cough* such as my own *cough*) were paying attention. That being said, there are still many people who are evacuated and homeless. If you’re interested in making a donation but skeptical of the Red Cross, Global Giving is the site that everyone seems to be vetting, for what it’s worth.

The Stories of Ibis

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Title: The Stories of Ibis
Japanese Title: アイの物語 (Ai no monogatari)
Author: Yamamoto Hiroshi (山本 弘)
Translator: Takami Nieda
Publication Year: 2010 (America); 2006 (Japan)
Publisher: Haikasoru
Pages: 423

After reading Melinda Beasi’s essay Twilight and the Plight of the Female Fan, I reached a strange epiphany. It’s okay if I don’t like Twilight! It’s okay if I don’t like Black Bird! It’s okay that I am never, ever going to enjoy reading manga like DearS and My-HiME! I am simply not the intended audience – and that’s okay. The point of Beasi’s essay is that fans should not judge other fans for being fans, even if they don’t personally enjoy the work that has inspired fannish behavior. Beasi has made this argument elsewhere, concerning shōjo manga and again concerning the Twilight fandom, and I agree with her. My own personal problem, however, is exactly the opposite. I do not get upset when people denigrate my interests; what upsets me is when I’m derided for not liking something that someone else feels I should.

One of my weak points in this regard is young adult fiction. I used to love it, but I’m almost ten years past sixteen and am beginning to find myself growing impatient with the tropes of both American and Japanese novels written for teenagers. Certainly, not every book written for a younger audience can be The Golden Compass or Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, but I still hold everything else to the same standard. This applies to Japanese light novels as well. Books like Nishizaki Megumi’s adaptation of Hot Gimmick and Coda Gakuto’s Missing series make me grind my teeth in frustration. Thankfully, there are young adult novels in Japan that are every bit as good as anything found in the West, and The Stories of Ibis is one of them.

The Stories of Ibis is pure science fiction directed at a presumably teenage audience, and it can boast everything that is fun about young adult fiction. The prose is clear and concise while still being creative. The narrative is very forward-driven without neglecting character development. Stereotypes are clearly referenced but then played with and expanded upon. Finally, the overall mood of the book is refreshingly positive. As science fiction goes, The Stories of Ibis is overwhelmingly utopian, but there are still lots of quests and uncertainties to keep the reader engaged.

As the title suggests, The Stories of Ibis is a collection of six short stories and two longer stories connected both by theme and by a frame narrative. The theme is the reality of virtual reality and, by extension, the power of fiction. Ibis, a humanoid robot blessed with artificial intelligence, tells these stories to the narrator of the frame story, one of the last human beings on earth. In the narrator’s world, humans fear and distrust robots, and the narrator travels from outpost to outpost, spreading tales of humanity’s glory before the rise of artificial intelligence. The narrator is wounded in an encounter with Ibis, who had been searching for him, so she reads him fiction as he recovers. In between stories (in short segments marked as “Intermission”), Ibis and the narrator discuss the stories, and their relationship gradually changes and deepens.

The first six stories are short, with each barely thirty pages in length. Only one of them is hard science fiction, and only one is strongly anime-flavored. The other four are set in more or less the present day and the present reality. All six deal with artificial intelligence or the reality of a virtual, fantasy world in some way. They’re all enjoyable; but, in my mind, the standout is the first story, in which people who only know each other through a Star Trek themed role playing site try to save one of their online friends from committing suicide in real life. The seventh and eighth stories are considerably longer than the first six, spanning one hundred pages each. I read a short review in Neo magazine that claimed that the two final stories made the book feel unbalanced, but I have to disagree. The final two stories are like a main course after an appetizer, and they are both excellent. Yamamoto reels his readers in with the first six stories and then lands us with the final two.

“The Day Shion Came” is about a nursing robot that whose programming has been implanted with a kernel of artificial intelligence. The robot is given over to a young human nurse to train as the two go through their rounds at a senior care facility. Certain A.I. clichés apply to this story, but they are not the ones you would suspect, and they are challenged and reworked in surprising ways. If there is a literary genre of magical realism, then “The Day Shion Came” might be termed science fictional realism, as everything about it is simultaneously fantastic and mundane. The final story is the story of Ibis herself, who draws together all of the “Intermission” segments by explaining the history of the frame narrator’s world. A remarkable feature of this story is the language that the A.I. entities use to communicate with each other. It’s both interesting and intelligent, but never overused or explicated at length. I won’t attempt to describe it here, but let it suffice to say that I have no idea how the translator was able to handle it so successfully. I tip my hat in admiration of her efforts.

In the final evaluation, The Stories of Ibis is a wonderful book for both young adult readers and adult readers who enjoy good young adult fiction. It’s neither too sci-fi nor too “Japanese” to put off people who aren’t fans of either “genre,” but I think it will still appeal to fans who are familiar with the tropes presented. In other words, like any good young adult novel, The Stories of Ibis attains the perfect balance of intelligence, accessibility, and creativity – and you don’t even have to feel embarrassed for enjoying it.